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House Rules
Backgrounds Backgrounds with XP To allow players to introduce and alter setting elements, Backgrounds may be purchased for the cost of 3xp per dot.This might bypass the normal training times and roleplaying methods for gaining Backgrounds, though attempting to do so invites the wrath of the Storyteller. Far better to stunt well, fit into the story and gain bonus points to offset the cost. At the Storyteller's discretion, players may go into experience debt to gain Backgrounds in this manner, and may receive refunds for losing or surrendering the Backgrounds. As in all things, the Storyteller's adjudication is necessary, and should be exercised to keep Backgrounds realistic, related to the story, and proportional to the effort invested by players. This is in addition to the Storyteller's normal ability to simply award Backgrounds, free of charge, as part of the development of the story. Status: Proposed Group-Purchasing Social Backgrounds Social backgrounds follow the same purchasing rules as large artifacts, ie characters in a circle may pool their resources to purchase them provided they are willing to share the resource. If a character does not want to share, they have to purchase it separately from the rest. If the characters do not want a shared resource granted by the ST they are not compensated XP, as the benefit of not taking a free background obviously must outweigh the benefit of having taken it in order that the character would choose to reject it - if someone gives you free candy, they're not going to give you money for saying no. Backgrounds following this rule are: *Allies: Because why the fuck not. Allies will always be abusively powerful no matter how you cut it. Only caveat is that the purchasing of high-dot allies should not be allowed to be shared between characters at character creation, because having large amounts of high-dot allies is even more abusive than normal. *Backing: This may be something that people will often want to hold to themselves, but there's no logical reason a circle can't share it. *Contacts: I thought this might be a bad idea at first but then realised that whether or not you allow it, it's functionally identical. This should only really come up when a group of people develop only one new contact, though. *Followers: Followers are easy for social characters to pick up but they don't serve any purpose unless you are a combat character. With that in mind, no reason they shouldn't be shared. *Influence: See Backing. *Resources: However see Resources house-rule, and note that any purchases equal to the level of the resources require the consent of all involved. Status: Proposed, substantially less important with current Backgrounds with XP setup as opposed to one in which you are expected to pay XP for all purchases. Still worth considering though. Resources Background When buying an item with Resources value equal to a character's Resources background, the background is not diminished. However, one cannot make another purchase of this magnitude until a full year of more moderate spending has passed. If the character has access to the business they were using to provide the resources, they may attempt to replenish their funds with a dramatic action taking a week. They then roll a suitable skill at difficulty equal to the Resources value. Examples of such rolls are Craft (for crafting), Bureaucracy (for most other businesses), Socialize (for extracting money from a kingdom or other social network). Other rolls which may be applicable are Stealth (for operating a spying network), Larceny (for running a thieves guild), War (for running a mercenary company) or any other roll that makes sense, however such rolls may receive an increased difficulty to indicate their unsuitability for such a task and the decreased difficulty of stunting on such a roll. As with all dramatic action stunts, if the dramatic action is successfully incorporated into a roleplaying session the stunt dice are converted to automatic successes. Rationale: This system is intended to simulate how the resources system works in a game that does not apply the Backgrounds with XP rule, because otherwise you're paying 3xp for every Resources 5 purchase from now until forever. Resources 5 purchases are pretty uniformly worse than Artifact 1 though, so this doesn't make sense. Requiring a description of how you fund such a purchase along with a time and location requirement is perfectly enough to balance it out, in my view. Obviously though it is up to the ST to decide how long the recovery intervals are and any other conditions that may be required. Status: Proposed Improved Familiar Background http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=358751&page=2%7CSee RPG.Net thread, first post on page 2. Having not read the mutations list I'm not 100% sure this is entirely balanced, but it looks pretty solid to me - at the very least, the central idea of making it so that a 1 dot Familiar is all you need to get the basic Familiar functionality with further purchases improving the familiar seems a perfectly feasible suggestion to me. I'd be pretty keen on starting off with said 1 dot Familiar and having it improve, anyway. I think if we use this rule it would be good to class the Familiar background as a magical background, but otherwise we should classify it as a social background. Status: Withdrawn. *Vic says: Actually, I don't think this is balanced as it stands. I agree with having a functional familiar of any sort at one dot, but getting the bonus mote pool should be a 4 point mutation, therefore requiring a minimum of a 2 dot familiar. This would make it a good deal more balanced. ** Having read a bit more about how Familiars work, I realise that this is probably unnecessary. After all, your familiar CANNOT die as long as you are alive, and if any effect would trump that and cause you to lose your Familiar you can use SSE to dodge the attack, just like you could if someone tried to break your sword or steal your hearthstone. So yeah, I guess I didn't realise that the point of Familiars is that their destiny is tied to yours with bonds of orichalcum. Combat famliars still don't scale for shit, but OH WELL. Merits and Flaws (Scroll of the Hero) Just wondering if we'll be allowed to take Merits from Scroll of the Hero. I'm not so keen on allowing Flaws, because they're better suited for Mortal Heroes than Exalted, but I think Merits should be buyable with XP. Just, y'know, disallow the fucking broken ones like Ambidexterity (+3 to all Dexterity rolls for 3 BP? Fucking hax!). I'm mainly asking cause I think I want to pick up Paragon of Temperance (Virtue cap increases by one) once Radiant Emerald starts to transcend her humanity. Status: Proposed, low priority. *But... but... if we allow flaws, I will at last be able to create... TORSOSORCEROR! He is a torso, and a sorceror! More seriously, seconded. Though, check out Cosmic Transcendence of (Virtue) in Infernals, and think about its Solar equivalent, Epic Zeal of (Virtue). I'll be grabbing that at some point, for similar effect. General Rules Dice Bonuses From Circumstances Easily-Overlooked Presence Method (230) invokes these, but there is no provision for them anywhere else in the rules! As there are no dice bonuses from circumstance, obviously this charm automatically succeeds, all the time. While I initially thought handling them like stunts might work, a better analogy might be superior equipment (365-6). Thus, a guard's alertness might be exceptional, adding one die to all Awareness rolls. Or he might not be quite so dedicated, but still paying a fine amount of attention, but only really to the main gate, and gain one die within the 'speciality' Watching the Gate. The consummate guard, refusing all distraction, investigating all oddities and also pumped full of thaumaturgical potions to maintain alertness and stamina, might have perfect attentiveness, and gain +2 Awareness, spotting Easily Overlooked Exalts and asking himself "how did this person really expect to get past me?" So what I'm proposing is that circumstances be invoked as if they were equipment, even in the absence of E-OPM. This blurs the line a little between equipment and stunts, but I think that is a Good Thing as it causes us to pay more attention to the setting even when dealing with extras. Status: Proposed. * Vic says: Seconded, though probably worth noting that this doesn't mesh perfectly with Easily-Overlooked Presence Method, unless you also assume that the disguise (or whatever) the Exalt is applying can qualify as Inferior equipment (which I'm sure I recall seeing but cannot find in the rules... oh well, easy enough to derive by applying the inverse of superior equipment). Even then, there's no real provision for the example given in Easily-Overlooked Presence Method where a Blood-soaked Solar in Orichalcum Plate at a ball gives everyone a +3 circumstance bonus. Though I guess you could assume that they have a terrible (-2) disguise, and everyone there has fine attention (+1 speciality in What is She Wearing?). Thaumaturgy as Regular Specialties Thaumaturgy is buyable at the XP cost of a regular specialty for an Exalt. This is because it is extremely weak compared to Exalted power, but should still be something one can do without being gimped, whether to represent training as a mortal or an attempt to gain a deeper understanding of Occult. Status: Proposed *Leith: Seconded. I like thaumaturgy and I'm a bit shocked that it costs a million XP to learn. It could be well worthwhile in a Dominion game, especially if we start digging into the impact on mortals. Food surplus = specialists, and in Exalted that means thaumaturgy. Half-Price Terrestrial Martial Arts for Celestials TMA charms should be buyable for half the regular price if the character is a Celestial Exalt. Same reason as the above house rule - it seems desirable to allow people to take sub-optimal choices in order to broaden the character, without being penalised heavily for it. Status: Proposed *Leith: seconded in principle; exact math to be tweaked through play. Crafts as Regular Specialties I'm not entirely sure about how this one would work, but I saw someone mention it on the White Wolf Wiki and thought I'd put it up here with the rest of the XP-savers. Basically I gather the idea is that you pick up Craft as an individual skill, and then buy specialties in Craft in order to allow you access to a particular type of Craft. If we're going with Backgrounds = 3XP, then this seems like an essential houserule to avoid making Crafts completely gimped. Status: Proposed *Leith: Our only confirmed Twlight has Craft: Wood (hur hur), and like no Exalt is going to take Craft: Water. The only reason Exalts can cook is they don't suffer unskilled penalties. Craft is an adjunct to most character concepts; to be a powerful crafter you only need one Craft, and then Magitech or Genesis later on. I lied about Water; a poisoner would take it. There are potential issues here but they only seem worth addressing if we actually have someone who's wanting 3 or more Crafts. And I'd prefer an XP discount on 'repurchases' of Craft; being an awesome swordsmith shouldn't qualify you for weaving. But yeah, let's not even talk about it unless someone encounters specific problems with their character concept. Shifting Committed Essence Since we're doing a campaign in which spending Peripheral Essence would be pretty goddamn bad most of the time, I think we need some way to manage the inherent unbalancing factor of the Night caste anima power. Obviously we don't want to overshadow the power completely, but as it stands it's just too overpowered for this style of campaign. My suggestion would be to allow us to "shift" Committed Essence into Peripheral Essence. The way I thought of having this work would be that one could spend personal essence to power a charm's activation, and then shunt the committed part of the power out to Peripheral Essence. This would effectively double the amount of essence required to power the charm's activation without concealing obvious effects, so it clearly does not overpower the Night caste awesomeness but would allow us limited access to our peripheral pools instead of "lol you committed all your personal, now you cannot do anything". This way, we can activate scene-long charms (and story-long charms during a scene, for that matter) without fucking ourselves over. Instead, we would have spent the motes from our personal essence and then could potentially recharge them through stunting, while still limiting our total available essence if things get crazy and we wind up going all "BLAZING POWER OF THE UNCONQUERED SUN!" Incidentally, it's worth noting that I couldn't find anything to indicate that you can't do something along this line by default. The rules on committed essence are remarkably vague. Possible modification: Make it take a miscellaneous action to shift one's committed essence and/or you can only shift a certain amount of essence per action (amount equal to essence maybe?), if this turns out to be too powerful. Status: Proposed Reduced XP Sinks External thread This is a pretty awesome idea, although it does change the nature of Exalted quite substantially. I'm not actively proposing this as a house rule for us to use, however I do think it is worth considering. The primary advantage to it is that it gets rid of the "you must make your combos gratuitously large and rebuild them completely if you want to add a new charm" rule that the Exalted corebook seems to think is hi fucking larious (Core, p247). Of course, the problem with what they've done there is that Kirby is not having fun, instead he's just getting dicked over by a nasty ruleset that favors experienced players. We avoid most of this by using large amounts of Social and Mass combat, so the changes to reflexive actions are mostly already incorporated. I like the changes to Ox-Body Technique, no further comments really. The changes to Excellencies are both awesome and bizarre. I can't even decide whether or not I like them. Anyway, just threw this up here because I find it interesting to consider. *Actually, the changes to Reflexives aren't really necessary. I don't really like them for Social Combat, wherein you do not even have to use excellencies most of the time. In Mass Combat they have no effect whatsoever because Mass Combat already works like that. The only place they have a profound effect is Solo Combat, but Solo Combat has a crippling degenerative disease anyway and I don't want to provide an incentive not to avoid it. *The chances to Ox-Body Technique are also not as necessary if you avoid Solo Combat like the plague. Our general will want Ox-Bodies, everyone else can skip it. *Changes to Excellencies I actually mostly agree with, but I'm not so sure about whether the changes to Infinite x Mastery are any good. It's nice that it makes it viable to use Dodge DV for once in your life instead of PDV being the god tier? Basically it fixes a lot of things but would involve a lot of discussion to get it to a state where everyone likes it. **I second the changes to Excellencies; supernatural skill should be a natural part of Exaltation rather than a 'special power' that we have to buy. The Infinite Mastery changes seem unnecessary; that level of power strikes me as a specialised, individual gimmick, with the default charms giving the right effect. Dodge needs fixing, on account of it requiring a whole extra Infinite Mastery of committed motes in combat, but that can be done by fixing one charm rather than all of them. As far as Ox-Body goes, though it's a boring charm I'm inclined to think that an extra ~40% health levels is not the sort of thing I want handed out with every increase in Essence. I could go either way; we do need some incentive to have combat-ready characters. And this campaign has an emphasis on Mass and Social Combat, not an exclusive commitment. As detailed elsewhere there are all sorts of circumstances in which we will likely be forced into personal combat, and while they may not come up often it only takes one to kill you. McLeith 16:24, October 15, 2009 (UTC) Teh Uber Defensive Combo This is an alternative to the above-suggested changes to Reflexive charms. the idea is that Exalts be allowed to pay a surcharge on a Combo, either a flat rate or a per-charm cost, that allows them to activate that combo in addition to any other charms or combos they use on their action. This would allow Exalts to have a generic defensive combo that they buy once and then use to supplement their other activities. Alternatively, all combos could be used this way, with perhaps a surcharge of an extra WP point applied to extra combos. This has the added advantage of making uber-attacks a little more viable - they may not have the effect they would if they hit, but an unprepared target will burn through 2+ WP defending themselves. Charms Phantom-Conjuring Performance Currently, it sucks. Here's a suggested improvement to make it actually interesting and useful: Essence enhances the Solar's arts. This charm allows the Solar to create ghostly images, Essence flares, ethereal music and strange sensory effects as part of any performance. These effects do not seem entirely real, they remain within (Essence x 50) yards of the Solar, and they cannot be used to deceive others without a stunt. This charm has no cost, but the Solar need not use its effects. However, a Solar who chooses to use these effects as part of a Social combat gains the benefit of +1 to effective Appearance. Finally, at a cost of 1 mote per hour the Solar may make the effects persist without having to be there, allowing a Solar considerable versatility in decorating an area with essence effects. Status: '''Proposed, possibly too powerful at the moment? However, I like the idea of making the charm into a one-stop shop for cool essence effects with no real power. After all, if you're spending 8 xp on an Exalted version of Prestidigitation with all the good stuff stripped out you'd at least expect it to be really great at performing the miscellaneous visual effects you have left. *Oh bugger, I forgot about Abyssals. Demon-Wracking Glory (MoEP: Abyssals p142) makes it significantly better, in line with the ways I was trying to get at. It's still a shitty charm and I think the +1 to Appearance is not really too offensive for the purposes of making it better, but most of the rest of the modifications are already incorporated in Demon-Wracking Glory. You also get to kill Creatures of Darkness by shouting at them! Uhm, yeah. Strength in Swiftness Method '''Cost: '''10m '''Mins: '''Martial Arts 4, Essence 3 '''Type: '''Reflexive (Step 1) '''Keywords: Combo-OK Duration: Scene-long Prerequisite Charms: '''Thunderclap Rush Attack Lawgivers in their battle fury move at the speed of light and may strike a thousand times in the blink of an eye. When a Solar using this charm performs a flurry consisting solely of martial arts attacks, each attack suffers a multiple action penalty equal only to its number in the progression; i.e., the first attack suffers a -1, the second suffers a -2 and so on. Additionally, a Solar who activates Thunderclap Rush Attack may attack once with each weapon for each activation of that charm. '''Rationale: '''This looks pretty powerful, but in reality it's not. It has one major advantage: Allowing Solars to use non-magical flurries without being gimptastic. It also makes Thunderclap Rush Attack into an actually useful charm. The reason behind the first effect is that even with a maxed out attack pool, Solars cannot make more than 5 attacks in a regular flurry. This means that there is no advantage for dual wielding, you can just pick up an Orichalcum Daiklave and happily swing away with your 5 attacks and no special penalty. Obviously, this means that characters who pick up Tiger Claws or the like are insane! That's dumb, because dual-wielding is awesome and should have a mechanical bonus instead of just "lol you paid extra artifact rating and lost access to a shield for no reason." The effect that makes it actually viable to dual-wield is based on the bonus that Fire Dragon practitioners get constant access to for just putting one charm into that style, so it is intentionally underpowered to commit 10 motes to get the same effect! I had originally considered making it a constant effect bonus for buying the charm, but a) constantly active charms are more of an Infernal thing than a Solar thing and b) a charm which serves no purpose other than "makes dual wielding viable" would be kind of boring? So I added the second effect, which is kind of like an Infinite Ability Mastery except for Thunderclap Rush Attack. Personally, I think the end result is quite agreeable, though YMMV. Also worth noting that it's reflexive, this is because I think Simple action buff effects where you just stand around shouting "I'MMA CHARGIN MAH LAZOR" are pretty lame. Being killed while chargin said lazor is also lame, as is having to build a special combo to avoid being killed while chargin it. '''Status: Proposed Artifacts ''' Glorious Throne of Revision '''Artifact ●●●●○ This powerful and unique artifact was in its prototype stages when the Usurpation took place, and as such only one exists. The user, who must posess Lore of at least 3 and Linguistics of at least 5, may attune it for 10 motes. The throne must also be installed in a Level 5 Manse. Once attuned, it grants the following functions: (Huge drawbacks! This is to make up for the fact that it is probably significantly campaign-altering) Its most basic function is to act as a receiver and transmitter for Recorders of Everlasting Glories and Million Word Forges (also duplicating the effect of a Million Word Forge). (Obvious one dot power). However, it also grants an additional degree of sophistication to the use of the Recorders of Everlasting Glories. Firstly, although Audient Brushes (and therefore Glorious Recorders) easily identify Natural Mental Influence, the Glorious Throne of Revision also identifies Unnatural Mental Influence effects, highlighted with a glowing colour representing the type of character who used the charm. By spending 5 motes, the user may roll of Perception + Lore at a difficulty of (Charm's Minimum Essence) to identify the charm and its intended purpose . Additionally, the Glorious Throne of Revision can be used to transmit Unnatural Mental Influence. If the owner posesses the charm Letter-Within-a-Letter Technique they may activate it at an additional cost of 1 willpower to retransmit the message, though the person who originally generated the mental influence will know what is happening and will have to re-spend (or maintain commitment of) the motes used for the attack. However, the owner of the Glorious Throne of Revision may use his own Manipulation/Socialize/Linguistics scores for this attack (This is probably 3 dots worth, but it will probably come up very rarely). The owner may also make regular Linguistics attacks through the Glorious Throne, with no penalty for doing so. Finally, the Glorious Throne of Revision may do as its name would suggest and revise the contents of the messages. This allows the owner to edit together newspapers from numerous submitted articles. These newspapers seem remarkably trustworthy, making it ordinarily impossible to identify them as the source of any mental influences contained within and requiring a Perception + Linguistics roll at a difficulty of (owners linguistics) for characters with charms specifically designed to void such an effect, such as Discerning Savant's Eye. Effects allowing enemies to avoid the effects of the mental influence work normally, they simply cannot figure out the source of the mental influence (if anything, more knowledgeable characters would be likely to mis-identify this effect as a dematerialized God using Subtle Whispers). *Leith: this sounds a little like a job for I AM, though that would explain why it had only just been invented at the end of the Age. tbh I think it sounds like a 5-dot artifact, or possibly a 3-dot artifact, while the accompanying modules (especially Million-Word Forge) have their ratings increased. A good concept for your Exalt's artifacts, but needs more work on mechanics, details of charm use through the mass media, stuff like that. Also, not the sort of thing I'd expect us to have just stumbled across. Remebered and reinvented, yes. Quested for, certainly. Perfected Recorder of Glories Artifact ●●●○○ Functions as an Audient Brush (Oadenal's Codex, ), but with additional functionality. For an additional cost of 3 motes the owner of the Recorder may choose, instead of writing what it hears, to transmit the recording back to the Glorious Throne of Revisions. The Recorder has an internal memory capacity of 100 pages, allowing this sending to be delayed somewhat. The brush may also scribe messages that are transmitted from the Glorious Throne of Revisions for a cost of 3 motes. Finally, if motes are not available, the owner may instead spend one willpower to activate any of its functions. Million Word Forge Artifact ●○○○○ This heavy and mostly steel artifact seems inert and thus most examples of this artifact can be found ignored in ruins or scavenged tombs. However, when the user of a Glorious Throne of Revisions chooses, they may send a series of pages to the jade and moonsilver plates for printing. The local controller can decide how many copies are printed, however at least one is always printed. TODO: Assign activation cost? Currently I'm thinking it has to be installed in a Manse or have a Level-1 Hearthstone plugged in to function. There should be no penalty for however many copies of the newspaper one makes, however. Combat Punching and Kicking Let's change the statlines for these two from "punch" and "kick" to "normal blow" and "strong blow", either of which can be performed with the hands or feet. Wuxia is too full of lightning-fast kick flurries for me to accept a literal treatment of the rules here. This house rule has no mechanical effects at all, and can in fact be freely stunted for without a 'house-rule' at all. Status: Irrefutable. Virtues New Virtue Flaw: Glorious Solar Friend Speech The name is a joke, suggestions welcome As Contempt of the Virtuous (Exalted, p107) only Compassion based and with Limit Break condition "the character witnesses innocents suffering from the selfishness of others." The content of the sermon the character gives is also different in that it focuses more on working towards the good of all. Rationale: I'd quite like to get Epic Zeal of Compassion, because it turns Compassion from being a gimpy virtue that just fucks your character over into something that's actually heroic and awesome. Also because Radiant Emerald genuinely wants to help the whole world, but she's a noble and so it should be pretty obvious that she doesn't give a shit about some douchebag peasant in a ditch somewhere getting beaten... Anyway, Epic Zeal of Compassion makes sense for Radiant Emerald, but going through a totally out of character emo phase while I gather enough XP to grab the charm doesn't. As such, I was thinking I could make Radiant Emerald have Compassion as her Flawed Virtue, but the only problem is that the Compassion Limit Breaks are terribad. Of the three in the sourcebook, there are two that consist of having a good cry while you get yourself killed, and the "MY LOVE FOR YOU IS LIKE A TRUCK, BERZERKER!" one which quite nonsensically makes your character awesome if and only if your character is Panther. Compassion Limit Breaks also have Limit Break conditions which are laughably common and obvious for enemies to trigger. The main difference between the two is that Compassionate Martyrdom is comically easy to trigger (innocents suffering through no fault of their own? Say hello to Mister Abyssal) but doesn't kill you unless you are out of Willpower, while Heart of Tears is harder to trigger but if it triggers at a bad time then even partial control results in a dead Solar. The Short Version: I want to have Contempt of the Virtuous or a similar Limit Break for Radiant Emerald, but I'm starting to think Compassion makes more sense than Temperance for her Flawed Virtue. ' ' Category:Rules